Top 5 Platform as a Service Providers

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Platform-as-a-Service is a young market, undergoing vast changes. Many of its key players have only been active in the field for a couple of years, with giants like Oracle and HP just recently getting into the game. As a result, you have to either be an established company (Google, Microsoft), or do something unique (Engine Yard focuses solely on Ruby, for instance). We previously covered the basics of PaaS benefits and key software vendors. Today, we’re taking a closer look at the top 5 PaaS providers. This post is part of our editorial series on how the cloud is transforming the way we do business today.

Windows Azure has the benefit of being delivered by a company with a long track record and expansive customer base in the software industry. It’s no surprise, then, that it’s one of the leading Platform-as-a-Service solutions from a user count perspective. But it also exceeds in terms of what it offers. Since its original announcement in October 2008, Azure has morphed into a full-fledged cloud services operating system with service hosting and service management capabilities. The Azure platform consists of three core components: Compute, Storage, and Fabric (to connect nodes on different servers). It has been generally available since 2010. That following year, Windows Azure beat out all other major PaaS vendors in cloud speed, in a test performed by Compuware.

Salesforce.com is considered by many to offer the most mature PaaS in the market today. Their offering consists of four different components: Force.com, for building custom employee apps; Heroku, for building customer apps (purchased in 2011); Database.com, a cloud database storing, per Salesforce’s estimates, over 36 billion transactions and 13 billion custom objects per quarter; and Site.com, a cloud CMS that enables users to quickly and easily build attractive websites. The differences between these four components are subtle. Database.com, for instance, is used to develop apps for social, cloud, or mobile that can run on various platforms, including Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine. Force.com, on the other hand, features point-and-click app development and comes with a home page, Chatter UI, and various BI components.

Salesforce.com’s platform is charged on a subscription basis. The company is particularly strong in the security and support areas.

When Salesforce.com bought Heroku in 2010, many industry analysts raised their eyebrows. Heroku prides itself on hosting web-based apps written specifically in Ruby. But there was another company doing the same thing, only they had been doing it for longer, with more staff, and more backing from venture capitalists: Engine Yard. The company has gone through some rough patches: it laid off 15% of its staff in ’09, switched CEOs that same year, and then shut down its data centers and outsourced its infrastructure to Amazon and Terremark (with a resulting premium on top of Amazon’s or Terremark’s pay-as-you-go pricing). But none of this has stopped the company from gaining a user base of over 2,000 Ruby enthusiasts.

Headquartered in The Netherlands, Cordys offers the Cordys Process Factory, a PaaS providing the tools and environment to create business apps for small and medium-sized businesses called MashApps. Additionally, Cordys offers a marketplace where users can download ready-made apps from the Cordys ecosystem. The company does not offer any hosting services. Process Factory is particularly popular among coders. Cordys Process Factory is priced based on usage or subscription.

Want more information on the top PaaS and cloud hosting solutions? We’ve compiled the top product reviews, blog posts and premium content on our cloud hosting research center page. Here, you’ll find all of the information you need to choose the right cloud solution for your business.

Deniz Kuypers, Director, Program Research at Business-Software.com, worked for years in Sales and Marketing, managing Global 2000 accounts in the area of financial automation. Responsible for lead generation, contract negotiation, and the development and execution of marketing strategies, Deniz was ...